for only the second time in 20 years the Jets are rated number one by FootballOutsiders. From the FO website: Here is this week's DVOA intro. There is more in the article on Football Outsiders
Football Outsiders is great.. I look forward to reading all the comments bashing Aaron Shatz and calling him a retard.
It's beyond stupid. I never took these guys seriously, and I could care less where they have the Jets ranked.
DVOA head to head has predicted the winning team correctly 74% percent of the time this season. You can't argue with that success. The closest ESPN pundit is only around 71%. Its a legitimate way of evaluating match ups. Success doesn't lie.
In a world concerned wayyyy too much about numbers, one thing is for sure, we're getting hot right now and this is the perfect time to CRUSH the Patriots
It's an interesting way to evaluate things and I agree that the ravens game severely skewed our stats. I know we are no offensive juggernaut but if you take out that game our offense would be somewhere in the middle of the pack and that's with a running game that really only kicked in 5 weeks into the season. As far as being ranked above the packers that is a bit crazy but if there is any team that can slow down Rogers it would be the jets. We give QBs more trouble than any other defense out there and I know it was a long time ago last Halloween but we held green bay to 9 points and no td's even when our offense couldn't get a first down most of the game.
It actually gives the Packers a better expected winning percentage (based on first quarter success and other things, apparently), but gives the Jets the number one "score," which seems to be because they rate the Jets offense better than the Ravens, and because they rate the Packers defense as beyond terrible. That plus a really, really strong special teams. For most teams, special teams barely impacts the rankings, but for the Jets, the special teams is worth more than the offense is. I don't agree with their rankings 100% (shouldn't the team with the highest "expected wins" be ranked number one?), it a lot of their reasoning is backed up on the field.
DVOA is radically inaccurate in terms of ranking great teams vs good ones. It has this problem almost every year, where a team that is clearly the class of the league is outranked by a .600 team that clearly is not. It's an interesting metric to look at but it does not ever tell us who the best team in the league is, primarily because it keeps putting solid all around teams teams like the Jets, Ravens and Steelers at the top of the rankings over teams that are actually the best in the NFL.
Can't argue with that. It assumes that if a team has a weakness that that weakness can be exploited. That is a weakness of almost all statistical analysis. I thought it was just as interesting that this is only the second time in 20 years that the Jets were rated #1.
I explained how you are wrong over three pages in the last thread. Disregard wins, DVOA suggests that other statistics are a better measure of how good a team is. Stop getting so hung up on wins or playoff seeding. There are certain facts you conveniently never respond to. You never got back to me and explained how DVOA head-to-head predicts the winning team 74% of the time. This is better then any ESPN analyst (71%) and ESPN Accuscore (72%). Once you can predict games better then 74% (you can't) you can say it is "radically inaccurate" until then try to understand the math behind it.
DVOA predicts which is the "best team." It doesn't tell you who will win the trophy. Those are not usually the same two teams. Any single elimination tournament will not judge who is best, just who wins. That said, I have no idea what 5ux's view of the "best" team is.
That's my whole point. 5ux argued that DVOA did not predict the outcome of the 2009 playoffs because the Colts and Saints were only ranked 8 and 6. But what he fails to understand is that the Colts and Saints only played teams with a worse DVOA in the playoffs, so it actually played out exactly how you would expect. You put it well, it predicts who is likely to win a game (and predicts it well) not "the subjective best".
It's just not a worthwhile metric. It would be wonderful if it actually sorted out the gems from the trash but it really doesn't. Anybody who thinks the Jets have been the best team in football by that amount through 8 weeks just isn't seeing the forest for the trees. Same for the Ravens in 2009. I'd love to be able to sort out the bias quickly and easily and present it but it really is an insidious bias and it resists that type of display. It's definitely there though.
Please answer this one question: How can it predict 74% of games head to head (better then literally ANYTHING we have access to) and not be a worthwhile metric? Unless you can answer that stop talking about things you don't understand. You have literally never answered this question in this thread or the last, keep conveniently avoiding it and saying vague things about "bias".
DVOA changes every week. If the Jets start to play worse then they could be ranked lower and hence lose to a team ranked higher. Upsets will always happen, but it is a statistically sound way to predict games.
